Book Reviews
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Thursday, April 22, 2004
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} -- Comment()
Scientists find computer speed limit: "If there is an article of faith in computer science, it's that everything can keep getting faster and faster. But scientists say they've discovered an apparent speed limit that will restrict how quickly data can be written onto disks and then retrieved."
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My old iBook is getting faster all the time -- Comment()
When Apple announced the new iBooks and PowerBooks on Monday (April 19th), I went to the Apple Store, selected a good configuration on 12" iBook and 15" PowerBook, and was almost ready to order a new computer. Only then did sense prevail. I'm actually quite happy with my 2.5-years-old iBook. In fact, the system has been getting faster, because Mac OS X 10.1 was quite slow in some tasks, 10.2 was already better, and 10.3 is rather nice in terms of performance. So, it feels like I have been getting a new computer every year since i bought the iBook. Of course, software has grown meanwhile, but many packages have also improved in performance: iPhoto, iTunes, Mail etc. My only regret is that I didn't originally get 640 MB of memory for the iBook, only 384 MB. The hard disk of 30 GB is still sufficient, however, even though I have 17 GB of music and 2 GB of photos on it. And as I recently ordered a new battery for the iBook, also battery life will get better, I believe.
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Smalltalk developer is honored -- Comment()
Smalltalk Creator Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing: "The ACM will honor Dr. Alan Kay with a 2003 Turing Award for his development of Smalltalk, the first complete dynamic object-oriented programming language and the template for Java and C++." I remember fondly Smalltalk, which I had to learn in a course on object-oriented programming. The programming project was done in pairs, and our task was to program an interface for chess, including features for checking that the moves made by the players were legal. Later I had Smalltalk on my Mac, and played with it a bit, but never used it for any larger projects.
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